“I was thinking I might stay up for a while,” I said. “My place isn’t far away. Would you like to come over for a drink?”
“I have to work,” she said nervously.
“Friday’s your day off.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, and blushed.
“One drink,” I smiled. “I promise I won’t try anything.”
She turned to me, her face washed with sadness. She ran her hand up the length of her sleeve, as if it itched.
“I want you to try something,” she said.
“Then I will,” I told her, fixing her dark eyes with my stare.
She came around the end of the bar, put her arms around me. She smelled like a mix of flowers and Johnnie Walker. Black Label; maybe even Gold. We kissed, and I felt the press of her body against mine, the slick rub of a tongue piercing as she explored me. The taste on her tongue was definitely Gold label, a brand Markers didn’t carry.
“Once,” she told me. “I’ll sleep with you once.”
I smiled, shrugged. “Who said anything about sleeping together? I’m talking about a drink.”
“Once,” she told me. I opened my mouth to protest – if we liked it, couldn’t we do it again? She put one finger across my lips, finding them still moist with her spit.
“Once,” she told me. “I’ll sleep with you only once.”
My apartment was a few blocks away, and as we walked she leaned against me, seeming to need support. Perhaps she’d been single for so long that the thought of being with me scared her. I wanted her so bad I knew once wouldn’t satisfy me; perhaps if I was good enough, she’d be open to a repeat performance.
I slipped my hand down the waistband of her pants, feeling that she, like the other girls at Markers, wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She cuddled up next to me as we walked. I took a deep breath of her – Scotch and flowers, fear and fire. I fumbled with my keys and let us into my apartment.
We tumbled onto the bed without turning on the light, and her mouth was insatiable. She pushed up into me, her back arching as my swelling cock found her leather-clad cleft. She moaned and pulled me hard against her. She kissed me like a savage, like a cannibal. She slipped her hands under my T-shirt and massaged my back, pushing her hands into my jeans to cup my ass. Her pussy rubbed firmly against my hard cock. She pulled her mouth from mine and my tongue worked eagerly after it, seeking. She grabbed my hair and forced my head back. I stared into darkness, Avril nothing but black, not even a shadow.
“Undress me,” she said.
“Let me light a candle,” I said. “I want to see you.”
“Not yet,” she told me. “Take off my clothes first.”
Kissing her tenderly, I unfastened her belt, peeled the moist painted-on leather pants down her thighs. I could smell her bare cunt the moment I exposed it; her musky tang was thick and hungry. I unzipped her boots and pulled her leathers off. Then she put up her arms and I pulled off her top.
My mouth found her tits and I felt the smoothness marred by tiny, almost imperceptible lines. They were barely there at all; my tongue could feel them, but my fingers couldn’t. Her nipples were pierced, which I’d known ever since I’d first laid eyes on those perfect orbs in their stretchy silk prison. I suckled her tits and teased her metal-cool rings with my tongue. She moaned softly and as I slipped my hand between her legs I found her wet. One finger slid easily into her; two made her tighten around it and moan louder; three, with a thumb on her clit, made her arch her back and gasp.
“Fuck me,” she said, her voice hoarse with desire. “But I need you to see me first.”
I got up in the blackness, fumbled for the candles in my nightstand drawer. I’d done this often enough with enough women to know the procedure without being able to see. Before I lit a match, I stripped off my T-shirt, kicked off my shoes, dropped my jeans and stepped out of them. My undershorts joined them on the floor, and I lit the match.
Avril stretched beautiful and pale on the bed, her white skin crisscrossed with black lines from the top of her throat to her wrists, from her shoulders to her hips to the lengths of her slender legs, all the way to her tattooed feet. Only a dead white spot at the top of her left breast remained unadorned, her natural skin color without benefit of ink.
“What the fuck?” I whispered.
“Light the candle,” she told me, and I did, snugging it into an old whiskey bottle.
I joined her on the bed, bending close to inspect her body. My eyes wide, I ran my fingers over the black lines, disbelieving.
They were names: hundreds of them. Written tiny in ornate script, large in dripping blood horror-letters, medium-sized in faux-typewriter. And a hundred other variations, two hundred, more than I could count. I ran my fingers over her, eyes wide, reading.
Richie. Darius. Mac. Jonah. Jerrold. Roland. Frederic. Quinn. Jeremy. Sean. Stanford. Walker. Mikhail. Tobias. Saul. Lawrence. David.
And on and on, in swirls and slants and grids around her naked body, leaving only her heart untouched. Names repeated, but were they the same names? Or simply echoes of past loves?
She looked into my eyes, her dark orbs flickering in candlelight.
“Men,” she told me. “Men I’ve been with. Every one of them. Even a kiss,” she said. “Even the smallest touch. Every one of them.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “Is it your . . . your mother?”
“You heard,” she said.
“I heard,” I told her. “Is it true?”
“That part’s true.”
“Is it why you do this?” I asked.
“I don’t really know,” she told me. “It just happens. Every time. It’s too late now,” she said. “We’re here. We’ve kissed. You’re mine.” Her hand moved to mine, took it, pressed it to the blank spot in her breast.
“I’m running out of space,” she said.
I kissed her, hard, and her tongue swelled against mine as her back arched and she pulled me onto her. My tongue traced a path from her mouth to her heart to her nipple, then down her belly to her pussy. I could barely see with the dancing shadows from her body writhing on the bed, but there were names there, too. Even on her lips; even on her pierced clit, so tiny I couldn’t read them. But the names above it I read; Anton and Val and Conrad stitched on the shaved, smooth mound of her sex. I closed my eyes and listened to her moan as my tongue worked her clit. When she came, she begged me to enter her, and I did, climbing atop her and sinking into her pussy so smoothly I almost came, myself, right away. But I held back and fucked her, my fingers tangled in her hair, each strand parting to show names written there, too, on flesh that must have once been shaved. I kissed her hard when I came, and she pulled me down onto her so hard I could feel her pubic bone against mine; she bit my tongue, drawing blood in the instant my orgasm peaked. When our lips parted, her lips were glossy with blood. “I love you,” she said, shuddering. “I’m sorry. I love you.”
Deep into the morning, I rested, Avril clutching herself against me, sighing almost sadly and murmuring in her sleep. The candle burned down to a ruined mass of wax, leaving acrid strains of smoke curling through the apartment, illuminated by the slanted light of the rising sun, segmented into improbable patterns by the Jolly Roger hung in my window.
I stared into the smoke and asked the question all men ask, or perhaps only most – how many? Hundreds, clearly, but how many more? Were names written in names on Avril’s body, the writing so dense that the names of new men had covered those of long-lost ones, the kind of cover-up you get when they throw you out of the street gang?
And what of the blank spot on Avril’s left breast – virgin white over her heart? Untouched, unspoiled, unknown?
Avril lolled to one side, dozing fitfully. She rested in a hot band of sunlight shooting molten from the window. I looked down at her and froze.
There it was. Written large, in block letters the color of blood: My name.
I might have thought I’d only missed it before; my name is not uncommon,
and Avril could have had one of me before. But there was no mistake. My name was written on her breast, in the spot that had been blank.
My name was written on her heart.
I shook her, softly, whispering her name. She stirred and shivered. She looked up into my eyes, and saw the question there. She looked down at her breast and her mouth dropped open slightly.
She turned her face to mine, sad, and shook her head.
She curled up onto me and whispered into my ear, her breath warm and Scotch-scented.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
When I woke she was gone. She’d left no trace except for her discarded leather pants and turtleneck top, her discarded boots. Perhaps she’d borrowed clothes from my drawer; smaller than me, Avril never could have fit in my jeans or my boots or my turtlenecks. Nonetheless, she was gone, the only trace of her the scent of her cunt on my body, the smell of her Scotch and her sweat and her tears on my bed. I went into the bathroom to wash her from me.
I stopped.
Staring into the mirror, I drew my hand to my breast. An inch above my left nipple, it was written in letters the color of blood. In feminine script, but shaky, fragmented, as if rendered by a tattoo artist being forced to do so at gunpoint.
The tattoo was fresh, as if she had rendered it while I slept, without waking me. Blood oozed from the fresh marker, trickling down my chest.
I knew she wouldn’t be there when I went back tonight after work. I knew she wouldn’t be anywhere that I would find her, ever again. I knew she was gone, vanished into the wind, roaming the planet wearing my name on her heart – touching it sometimes, late at night, whispering into the darkness: “I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry . . .”
I stood there in the mirror and ran my fingers over the bloodied script of Avril’s name carved across my chest like the notebook scrawlings of a very small girl, lovesick and alone.
I could smell her in my nostrils, taste her on my lips.
See her named on my body, rendered by a lovesick girl in the middle of the night.
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